Dear Drugs-Forum readers: We are a small non-profit that runs one of the most read drug information & addiction help websites in the world. We serve over 3 million readers per month, and have costs like all popular websites: servers, hosting, licenses and software. To protect our independence we do not run ads. We take no government funds. We run on donations which average $25. If everyone reading this would donate $5 then this fund raiser would be done in an hour. If Drugs-Forum is useful to you, take one minute to keep it online another year by donating whatever you can today. Donations are currently not sufficient to pay our bills and keep the site up. Your help is most welcome. Thank you.

It's easy to find a lot of opiate detox remedies. There are masses of texts and most of them advice all the same herbal remedies, amino acids, ...
Why always the same? Because it really helps? I don't think so. I believe it's copy&paste. I am sure that nearly all of this recipes are a lot of bullshit.

I did a opiate withdrawal. I couldn't sleep at all. So I took some benzodiazepines. I ate a lot of diazepam, flunitrazepam and so on. But I still couldn't sleep so I took more benzos. In the end I have so many benzos in my body that I wasn't able to walk. I missed the door and hit the wall two meters away from the door. As my girlfriend told me, I tried it some times again before I crawled on the floor into bed. I ingested so much benzos that I couldn't talk anymore and next day, I remembered nothing. My girlfriend had to tell me what I did.
Even those medicaments in high doses didn't help me to sleep. And there are masses of recipes on the internet that advice to take some valarian root during withdrawal against insomnia.
This shall help? I don't believe!
The same for vitamins and other stuff. Of course, vitamins, minerals and trace elements are important and you got problems if you have a deficiency. But how should this stuff help when you have no deficiency? I don't think that some vitamins will be able to reduce withdrawal symptoms.
It is often said that e.g. a good b-vitamin-complex shall give you new power during withdrawal. I believe, when I feel like shit and have no more power to stand up and go for a walk, b-vitamins won't change anything. All people who state that it gave them new power, had only light withdrawal symptoms and a strong placebo effect. This is what I think.
It is easier to withdraw when your body is healthy and strong rather than sick and weak. So a good nutrition is important. But I don't believe that some vitamin capsules will help. It would advice to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, no fast food, etc.. But probably this will make no great difference in the severity of withdrawal symptoms. You will feel like shit in any case.

And there are a lot of examples more. For example: Fish oil. Everywhere you read the advices to take fish oil capsules. Has anybody tried to take fish oil capsules during withdrawal? Did it help? How should it help? What should happen? I only read this advice but I never read an explanation for what it shall be good. Any ideas?

I don't believe that something like the Thomas Recipe will help. But I know that there are some remedies/medicines/supplements that will help.
If you break your leg and the bones come out the skin and somebody advices you to take one acetaminophen pill, you know that this is ridiculous and will not help. So why don't you laugh when someone advices you to drink German chamomile tea for heroin withdrawal pain or melatonin for withdrawal insomnia?

There are already some topics with collections of withdrawal remedies. But most is bullshit.
What are really working remedies? Please don't post something you just read on an internet forum. Please write about what you have taken and where you know from your own experience that it helped. Or write why you think that something could actually help (e.g. clinical studies).

Dr. Sibghatullah Sangi: Role of Nigella sativa in Opioid Dependence
I will try this. It really seems to help. I will tell you my results next month.

GBL/GHB helped me. It reduced my withdrawal symptoms and not just a little. It was a really big help. It took my pain away. It helped my to sleep. It helped with nearly all withdrawal symptoms. I would say, it took 80-90% of all my withdrawal symptoms away. Every 4 hours 2ml of GBL.

Kratom and Iboga shall help but I didn't try them. I will try kratom next month. There is a lot of stuff that I want to test...

Loperamide helped with diarrhea. Dosage as written on the package will work perfectly for diarrhea.
If you increase the dosage and take maybe 20-200 pills more (depends on how much opiates you took) it will also reduces your other withdrawal symptoms.
Also no absolutly perfect cure but you feel much better. This can make a difference from "puke all the time & can't wake alone" to "ok. I go for a little walk".

Interesting post and one that I imagine many of us will be following closely. To address your first point first:

Everything I've read concerning the benefits of vitamins, fish oil, amino acids etc in relation to withdrawal suggests that these substances should be incorporated as part of a long-term PAWS/staying sober strategy rather than being employed to relieve the acute symptoms associated with opiate withdrawal. In other words, vitamins, minerals, amino acids etc should be increased in the weeks and months after opiate withdrawal in order to restore and repair normal brain function. In terms of providing relief during the acute WD stage I would agree that none of these naturopathic substances would be any use at all.

In terms of what really helps with the misery of withdrawal? The last time I went through it I tried loperamide with varying results - at times it really seemed to help, at other times it provided no relief at all and I did find that after two days of continually taking more and more lope I was reaching a saturation point where just the thought of taking more made me nauseous.
I also took benadryl to try and sleep. Normally one cap of benadryl knocks me out for hours ( I'm given it every three months when I get my anti-cancer antibody infusion). During withdrawal it became completely ineffective.

My two biggest issues with withdrawal are insomnia and muscle spasms (that feeling like electricity is being shot through your muscles) - clopinidine (sp.?) is reputed to help by lowering blood pressure which because of WD is suddenly much higher than one is accustomed to. If and when I go through WD again I will try clope, making sure that I'm not alone when I do.

As for Kratom, I considered using that too. A friend of mine whose situation and opiate dependence is very similar, did use it and told me that for anything beyond a very mild opiate tolerance Kratom would be a waste of time. Of course each person's experience is subjective so it may work for you.

Kratom is also another good remedy you already mentioned, however it causes its own withdrawals in itself because of the fact that it uses the same Opiate receptors, but isn't actually an Opiate/Opioid itself.
Switching to a good brand of Kratom from a heavier Opiate addiction, and than eventually slowly weaning off of the Kratom itself to make the withdrawals a lot more bearable could be pretty helpful though, but I would only recommend this for people who have extreme self-restraint and can actually do this with messing things up.

One that wasn't mentioned here already that I think you should look into is something called D-Phenylalanine. NOT L-Phanylalanine, D-Phenylalanine.

D-Phenylalanine is a non-protein amino acid related to the essential amino acid L-Phanylalanine. D- and L-Phenylalanine are structural mirror images of each other, however they both do completely different things.

D-Phanylalanine itself is reported to inhibit an enzyme that degrades enkephalins, which are naturally occuring substances in the body that belong to the class of compounds known as "endorphins". What this means is that the supplement can actually slow down the break-down of endorphins themselves, giving you more in the end than you would usually have.

I would assume that this would be helpful when recovering because a newly recovering Opiate addict has no endorphins himself, so I think this supplement could possible help speed up the recovery time.
And than once the body has actually started to produce its own endorphins again, taking this supplement will most likely increase the amount of endorphins in the person taking it, aiding in recovery and helping things be less painful and more manageable.

I also think that D-Phanylalanine can be very helpful to people with endorphin deficiencies as well, which very well is a lot of us recovering addicts.

D-Phenylalanine itself is known to help with pain as well, probably because of the increase in endorphins when using the synthetic amino acid.

It may not make a HUGE difference in the acute phase of withdrawals like say taking an Opiate would, but it would most certainly help at least, and I can definetely see it being very beneficial during PAWS as well.

Note that D-Phanylalanine cannot be found in local stores whatsoever from what I know and has to be purchased online from a reliable vendor.

*Do not confuse D-Phenylalanine from L-Phenylalanine either, because the difference is durastic and crucial.
L-Phenylalanine itself does nothing for the endorphin system and rather focuses on Dopamine and other neurotransmitters. L-Phenylalanine itself can easily be found at local stores, while D-Phenylalanine is very hard to come by and will most likely have to be purchased online like I said above.

I believe that that D-Phenylalanine in combination with Loperamide and possibly some other remidies of your choice can be pretty helpful during both the acute and the post-acute withdrawals (PAWS).

Short-term Suboxone or Methadone use works very well for many people out there as well when it comes to getting over the acute-withdrawals. But it's important that they're used for only a short enough period of time so that you don't develop an addiction to them instead, unless one is actually choosing to go the maintenance route. It would be best to do either of theses under a Doctors supervision though, rather than trying to do it all on your own.

Benzodiazepines are also a good one that you mentioned already for anxiety, but they shouldn't be used for too long to avoid addiction* (don't switch one addiction for another).

Phenibut has also been very helpful to many during Opiate withdrawals.
However, tolerance and addiction to Phenibut does occur extremey fast, so one has to be very careful when using Phenibut.
I would recommend using no more than 1.75 grams, once every 3 days to avoid any rebound effects/withdrawals. This schedule has aways worked for my dog perfectly.
Using any more Phenibut than that or using any more often than that, has always lead to days of trouble for my dog,which was never fun at all.
Don't be tricked by Phenibut's legality, its withdrawals can be very brutal and has sent many people into rehabs just like any other addictive substances out there, so using it responsibly is VERY important.

Kava Kava is also another thing you could look into when it comes to anxiety relief. Kava Kava works pretty well for some people at alleviating their anxiety, and is completely non-addictive. The only danger when using Kava (especially often) is the possible negative effects that it can have on the liver. Certain forms like Kava Pastes though, have been gauranteed against any liver damage whatsoever, or so they say.

Some people have also found DXM to be very helpful at curing Opiate withdrawals, including my dog. However, daily use can become dangerous and can cause it's own set of problems, so it's important to be very careful if ever going the DXM route. It is also important to get the kind that only contains DXM and nothing else, for obvious safety reasons.
I should also mention that you should absolutely never mix DXM with anything that effects Serotonin (5HTP, L-Tryptophan, SAM-e, St.Johns Wort, MDMA, MDA, etc.), as this can lead to Serotonin Syndrome and can be very dangerous and even fatal in some cases.

Here is one man's experience with using DXM as a cure for his Opiate withdrawals:"Typical withdrawal day begans with awakening to nightmare. Pain in muscles and joints, cold, shaking, sweat and extreme yawning not to mention craving for anything that helps. Then I gulp down 100 ml 3 mg/ml cough syrup. It tastes absolutely awful but is worth suffering. I lay back trying not to throw up and start moving my legs to find less painfull position for them. After half an hour it is possible to keep them still and on one hour mark it is possible to lit cigarette, smoke some hashish and eat. No much pain left, only some yawning. And most amazingly I can feel almost warm. Effect lasts from few hours to over 12 hours depending on opiate and dxm tolerance."The rest of the above experience can be found here: http://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=11056

You can also check out something called "The Thomas Recipe" for a recipe on withdrawal remedies, as I have heard that it works quit well when it is used right.

Great topic and one that is important to many addicts, or just long-term opiate maintenance patients that feel better, and decide to stop opiate therapy. AFOAF just recently stopped opiate maintenance treatment and went through hell, or he/she says so. The pain Dr. was no help. The method that worked for this AFOAF after going back to opiates use because the acute withdrawal, is so forth:

He/she used long acting opiates (LAO) ie. suboxone 8mg rotated with short acting opiates (SAO) ie. hydrocodone, oxycodone. When this AFOAF started his first 8mg suboxone (It's highly advised that withdrawal needs to begin before using this drug) he/she was able to withstand 3 days with no other opiate. Then he/she used SAO. This AFOAF took one dose of 80mg of oxycodone and he/she said that after that relatively large dose, in his/her case, felt fine and there were no apparent acute withdrawal symptoms for 32 hours after the single SAO dose and then at around 40 hours felt a little bad and took suboxone 8mg and repeated the process for a few weeks and then halved the doses every rotation between LAO and SAO. After a month or so this AFOAF felt no real acute withdrawal symptoms. Sleep was mildly disrupted and was combated with neurontin 1200 mg (used to aid sleep and restless leg syndrome) and if sleep was harder to reach some days he/she took Klonopin 3 mg (also to aid sleep). After a little more than a week this AFOAF was opiate free and relatively post acute withdrawal syndrome (PAWS) free.

This method worked for this individual and was not an addict and read research into LAO and SAO rotation for opiate tolerance. That knowledge helped the gradual detox plan he/she used and was successful. This AFOAF has not taken opiates for a few months now.

This is a true story and worked for this AFOAF and may not be the same if someone else were to use this rotation method.

In detox we weren't allowed to have vitamins until the 4th day.... caffiene also. The thing that helped sooo much for me was quinine. It helped with the shakes, cold sweats, sleep, and aches and pains. If you can't get a script.... hylands leg cramps has it in it and also tonic water. After detox I had chills every now and then and of course leg pain that I still have, its a godsend. Apparently its given to malaria patients to ease symptoms. My dr said to take it with extra strength tylenol, it works better. The prescription version works better obviously but the otc helped alot also.